The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
[ . . . ]
The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
That’s right. The US national security hinges upon (to hear the President and his defenders tell it) adherence to Chinese-developed torture techniques studied and determined to result in false confessions. And what was on this chart, exactly?
The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”
The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
We - as in me and you - need to make holding everyone involved in the adoption of torture by the US gov’t to account.
Apparently it’s been a confusing issue for the United States.
This is the cell on Robben Island that he spent 17 years in:
Remember, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And I never needed the US government to tell me which Nelson Mandela was. Neither should you.
“tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.
“The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted –both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.
“In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .
“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
What are you going to put on the line? Are you going to make space in your life, in your conversations, in your vote, for standing behind him? For standing up for what separates “us” from “them”?
And they get to the crux of it pretty well, right here:
Metro is the second-busiest transit system in the country, after New York. On several days, when no special events were scheduled, ridership exceeded 800,000 trips.
Metro is the only major transit system in the country without a significant reliable stream of funding. While transit systems that include those in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia are guaranteed a portion of a gasoline tax, sales tax or other revenue to help pay costs, Metro must seek financial aid each year from the District, Virginia and Maryland.
A bill sponsored by Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) to authorize $1.5 billion over 10 years to Metro for capital improvements and maintenance was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this week as an amendment to a bill authorizing funding for Amtrak. The Metro measure is to be matched by the District, Virginia and Maryland; all three jurisdictions have pledged matching funds.
Metro has been subject to some mismanagement in its history, to be sure. But the past few years (esp. under Dan Tangherlini, now City Administrator) have seen some solid improvements. But the best management in the world can’t overcome chronic funding issues.
maybe almost gone. Even though they’ve been going out of business for what seems like forever now (not their fault - it’s an everchanging landlord issue), it looks like Orpheus Records really are finally winding things down. Was just in there, and the stock is dwindling. Not so much that it’s not worth a trip, if you’re still into vinyl (I picked up a nice first pressing of Billy Preston’s Everybody Likes Some Kind of Music).
With a bonus from Gogol Bordello, which I first discovered because some woman sitting in the same row as me on a CDG-JFK flight was wearing one of their t-shirts:
I’m a pretty reliable defender of DC’s Metro system. The people that bitch about it either 1) don’t use it, 2) have never used another metro system in the US, or 3) are from NYC. Which means that its critics have no standing, by definition. But that defense got a little harder this week - a couple of near-shutdowns of the Orange line in VA this week, and apparently the Red Line is a complete clusterf(@k at this very moment. And who’s the only person in VA really trying to do something about this? Outgoing Rep. Tom Davis(R). Strange days. C’mon, Jim.
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SciFi site io9 asks William Gibson questions no one else does, and gets interesting answers as a result (imagine that):
None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.
I don’t think a writer can hit the dystopic key without being misanthropic. I’m actually not misanthropic. I think people are capable of wonderful things. I’m quite fond of them and enjoy their company.
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Speaking of Wonderful Things, the Directory Of pointed us to this gem yesterday:
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The New York Times is running a series on the them of American Exceptionalism, and this article on the near-absolutist take on free speech is excellent. I want to write more about that, but I thought I’d throw up the link now, lest it get lost in the ever-growing pile of drafts around here.
This evening I received a copy of the above mailer from the Singh campaign (which told me that one of its staffers received it in the mail today). Several quotes and positions are attributed to interviews published here at Blacknell.net. Of singular concern to me is the first bulleted statement on the top left of the mailer - “Amit said he will not vote for John McCain in November - Interview with Blacknell.net 3/26/08″. Nowhere on Blacknell.net will you find any statement or quote from Amit Singh that even gets close to implying such a thing, and at no time in my interview with Amit Singh did he make such a statement. The Ellmore campaign mailer is - in a word - false.
Political candidates are free, of course, to argue over and characterize each other’s positions as they please. They are not, however, entitled to make demonstrably false statements and source those statements to third parties such as myself. At the moment, if any voter who has received this mailing decides to look further into its claims by coming to Blacknell.net, the Ellmore campaign has created a situation in which it appears that one of us is lying (the campaign by its claim about what can be found here, or me at Blacknell.net by no such thing being here). This is unacceptable.
The Singh campaign has communicated to me that intends to do all it can to communicate to 8th CD voters that the statement at hand is false. I expect the Ellmore campaign to do the same thing.
(The front of the mailer is here. I personally altered it solely to remove the name of the addressee. That is the only change that has been made.)
Update: The Ellmore campaign contacted me - after some time - and acknowledged that the claim at hand was false, attributing it to a production error (i.e., a mixup while changing the claims and sources on the flier and making the final selection). I’ve pasted the campaign’s statement to that effect in the comments below. There has been much ado over the flier amongst Virginia Republican sites, and if you want details, well, that’s where to go. If you’re more interested in the issues, I have a my final pre-primary piece on the race up here.
